


by which we see ourselves

by elegantstupidity



Category: Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Space, Crushes, F/F, Family Dynamics, First Meetings, Metafiction, pre Catherine Bennet/Georgiana Darcy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-14 14:05:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13591635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elegantstupidity/pseuds/elegantstupidity
Summary: Cat just wanted to escape the flat and her family. Escape the entire black hole of a space station, if she's being honest. Until she could afford a one way ticket for the Inner Ring, though, she'd settle for a ticket to whatever was screening in the vidhall. What she didn't expect was to come out of the show more annoyed than she'd gone in.Well, at least she wasn't the only one to exit the vidhall resenting the hell out of Jane Austen.





	by which we see ourselves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [penna_nomen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/penna_nomen/gifts).



> Title from a Alejandro González Iñárritu quote.
>
>> _"Cinema is a mirror by which we often see ourselves."_   
> 

Cat Benson left the vidhall with a creeping sense of unease at the back of her throat. 

It wasn't a feeling she was familiar with, and not one the sweeping panoramas and crowded ballroom scenes should have inspired. Nonetheless, there it was, sitting cold and heavy somewhere behind her voice box.

This was not the outcome she wanted when she wandered into the showing of some Earth film from P.D. 267. While the chance to boggle over the antiquated rules—rules that had long been antiquated when the vid was made—governing women's lives and the pretty but impractical clothing was a definite perk, Cat was more interested in the two hours it gave her away from the Benson flat. For two hours, she had a pretty good reason to silence the alerts on her wrist panel. (Even if her mother had come to think that there was no reason good enough not to have constant access to her daughters. Cat couldn't really blame her, not after the cycle the Bensons had.) For two hours, she could forget the fact that the apartment she'd grown up in had started to feel more like a prison cell lately.

It wasn't a surprise. Square meterage on Meri-10 was at a premium and always had been. As Elys, and their father, liked to say, the Interplanetary Alliance wasn't going to outlay credit to renovate a research station that hadn't won an IA-Science Corps research grant in at least 20 cycles. Still, space wasn't so limited on their outdated station that larger family apartments were impossible to come by. Once a fourth daughter had been added to the brood, the Bensons automatically had qualified for a bigger living space; Cat had looked it up in the Meri-10 Official Station bylaws when she was twelve and seriously considering filing for emancipation. Unfortunately, her father wasn't so well informed. In his opinion, if the information couldn't be found in one of his old, dusty books, it generally wasn't worth knowing.

No, it wasn't a surprise, but it didn't change the fact that Cat sorely needed a break from her family.

Her entire family.

Like, _all_ of them.

Why were they still here? Mom and dad were obvious—mom would die in their flat if she had her way and dad was dad. She and Lex couldn't leave the nest yet, though Lex had certainly tried before that blew up in her face. In everyone's faces, really. Anyway, Cat still had a few months left in IA-mandated schooling, and Lex was a cycle behind that. Only once they'd earned their graduation certificates could they legally allow strike out into the galaxies on their own. 

So why in the ever-loving hell were Mae, Elys, and Gemma still hanging around this black hole a second longer than they had to? Even Mae—easily the most boring of Cat's sisters—deserved better than this non-blip of a station.

Yeah, yeah, they loved each other, but really. That was the whole point of commlinks. They could keep loving each other from an amazing station much closer to the Inner Ring, somewhere their family's business wouldn't make even a splash in the gossip mill's pond. Here, the Benson girls, and Lex's recent disappearance, felt like all that kept the mill in business.

Still, that was no reason for her older sisters to keep hovering. Lex had come back, safe and, well, mostly sound. There were nights still that she woke up Mae and Cat with her whimpering nightmares, but those were coming less and less often.

At the very least, Cat was sure they didn't have to all do it from the same family apartment.

It felt like she couldn't move without stepping on someone's toes, sometimes literally. 

In all the time she’d been growing up, that hadn’t changed. It just was more noticeable now. With all five adult daughters now at home, along with her mother and father and the various domestic units, the home Cat had known her whole life was beginning to chafe. 

Well. It had been chafing for ages, but it was much easier to pretend the situation was less dire when someone was gone, as had happened so often this cycle.

(First, Elys'd gone off to visit Charlie Lumis—who’d had the blended luck and misfortune to go into business with their static-brained cousin. On the one hand, she had to deal with Billy on a daily basis. On the other, she got off Meri-10 and was probably living it up over on 100-Sphore, which had its own shuttle hub and three vidhalls, as Maryska Lumis wouldn't stop bragging. No sooner had Elys gotten back then Gemma was gone. Cat was pretty sure Gemma didn't go stay with their cousins on Albion Station to chase after Deputy Commissioner Bingh as their mother dreamed, often aloud, but escaping those insinuations probably played a role. Then Elys'd disappeared  _again,_ this time on a tour the Cumbrian Galaxy because she was their aunt's favorite. Which of course wasn't even considering the whole Lex thing. Most of them did their best not to consider the whole Lex thing.)

For one, Mae fucked off to their older sisters’ room, leaving her and Lex to gossip and talk about the latest trends from the IR without constant interruptions about the working conditions for people who manufactured the clothes they were so busy drooling over on their wrist panels. They got it; capitalism hadn't magically been fixed upon its removal to space. That didn't mean they couldn't appreciate the design work.

For another, Cat felt less like a disappointment without her perfect older sisters around.

She was relatively sure that Gemma and Elys didn't  _try_ to make her—and Mae and Lex too, probably—feel like this. Well, Gemma definitely didn't. Elys could be judgmental when she wanted to be. Still, they were genuinely good people. But God, was it hard to live up to them. It was so much easier to coast, in school and with their parents, the station at large. Not much was expected of Cat Benson, and that was the way she liked it. Most of the time.

Even with the whole brood in the nest, with Mae's moralizing and Elys's quieter disapproval and Gemma's unthinking perfection, Cat had never felt invisible or forgotten. 

Now, she was wondering if she should have. 

Oh, fuck that.

That sense of unease lodged in her throat shifted into anger.

She wasn't like that girl, the one who pouted and cried and lost her mind over boys. Even if they almost had the same name, that didn't mean they were similar. Sure, there were a lot of superficial things that, on the surface, may have made it seem like they were, but that didn't mean—

Her heart raced, and her lungs worked hard to match its pace. Distantly, Cat was aware she was panicking. She was mad and she was panicking and she was mad about panicking. 

All because of some vid!

It was stupid. She was being stupid. She told herself that, chanting it in her head as she leaned against the cool wall of the station's hull, hoping the bite of the metal against the back of her skull would knock some sense into her. It sort of worked, even as she realized that stupid girl in the vid was stupid too, so her self-chastisement wasn't all that comforting.

Okay, too many stupids.

Cat dragged in a rough breath, and then another and another until each inhalation no longer felt like a battle. Only then did she take stock of herself, opening up the vitals screen on her wrist panel and closing it as soon as she saw how elevated her heart rate actually was. Well, at the very least her chest felt less like she'd taken a spacewalk without a SCAPEsuit.

How had some vid she'd never heard of—a miracle in and of itself since she and Lex once made it a point to go and see every new vid screened onstation—and made centuries before she was born, centuries before humankind left Earth and took to the stars, made her feel like this?

It was ridiculous! Just because things about that family—five daughters, high-strung mother and an absent, sardonic father; not to mention their name—seemed awfully familiar didn’t mean anything. Cat wasn't like that silly, empty-headed girl who’d been played just for laughs. Sure, at least _she_ hadn’t ended up married to some creep—if there was one thing she was grateful to that stupid, sappy vid for, it was showing her that the whole Lex thing could've turned out so much worse—but she hadn’t ended up _anything_ by the end of the story, either. 

Not that Cat was particularly interested in the future destined for Kitty Bennet, historically speaking. Between spinsterhood or marriage plus popping out kids until you died, there wasn't much to tempt her. Marriage, in the very distant future, sounded fine, but Cat had never met a boy that she'd willingly share a living space with. Let alone fall in love with.

Now girls, on the other hand... 

She had a feeling, though, that Jane Austen wouldn't have considered that an option for Miss Kitty or any of the Miss Bennets.

Cat sucked in a deep breath and pulled herself out of her spinning thoughts, forcing herself to take in her surroundings. It would be just her luck to have one of her mother's friends catch her in the middle of a mini breakdown in a public bay. Yet another page in the saga of those poor Benson girls. 

Fortunately for her, the crowd from the vidhall had mostly cleared away, leaving her in unobserved solitude. 

But not completely alone.

Across the lobby, a girl stood staring out one of the viewports, shoulders hitched up around ears and her fingers curling into the sides of her shirt her arms must've been crossed over her stomach so tightly. Even looking at just the back of her, she seemed almost as upset as Cat herself. 

It set her teeth on edge. 

There wasn't enough room in here for them both to be miserable, and Cat wasn't leaving. She cleared her throat, loud enough to catch the attention of the interloper.

“Oh,” she said, batting her big, innocent eyes as she turned from the view and caught sight of Cat. Cat blinked back, unprepared for the sight of what may have been the prettiest girl she'd ever seen. Prettier even than some of the models she and Lex used to obsess over—for different reasons, probably. She was all dark eyes and smooth, golden skin that could only be natural or the product of hours in a PseudoSun™ Booth. Well, she may have been pretty, but that didn't change the fact that Cat was reeling from having her entire worldview rocked by a ridiculous, ancient vid. She wasn't prepared to be nice. “I didn’t realize anyone was still here.”

“Well, I am,” she sniped, feeling a little bad when the other girl’s face fell. But only a little because she was just as gorgeous looking crestfallen as she was before. Mostly Cat was suspicious. She knew everyone roughly her age on station, but this girl was thoroughly unfamiliar. Squinting distrustfully, she demanded, “Do I know you?”

“Oh,” the girl repeated, tucking a dark strand of hair behind her ear. It fell back into place almost immediately, too short to stay put. Cat didn’t find it amusing. Or charming. Not even a little. She was annoyed, damn it. “Um. No, probably not? My brother and I, we’re visiting some friends, but I’ve never been here before. I’m Gia.”

She stuck her hand out, oddly formal for someone who looked younger than Cat was herself. Then again, this girl’s clothes just screamed Inner Ring. No one out here wore clothes with that many holes in them, let alone ones that were manufactured that way just as hers obviously were. Most of their clothing was recycled or second hand, yes, but that didn’t mean they’d let themselves look ragged. Anyway, there was no telling when the climate regulator might decide to take a break and plunge the entire station into the Seventh Ice Age. Much safer to layer up.

Cat just eyed her, wary. Could she be blamed for a little distrust after the cycle her family had? Newcomers to Meri-10 hadn’t done much good for any of the Bensons lately. 

Gia wilted, her hopeful smile fading and hand reaching up to tuck that errant strand of hair behind her ear again. It didn’t stay put any longer than it had the first time, but it did make Cat soften, just a little. 

It wasn’t this girl’s fault she was in a bad mood. It wasn't her fault she happened to be here as she worked through a minor paradigm shift to her entire sense of self. Cat could be polite. And not just because this girl, Gia, had a smile that made her stomach tighten in a way that had nothing to do with anxiety. Or, if it did, it was a good anxiety.

So, Cat shook her hand. 

“Cat.” Okay, this handshake thing was weird. When was she supposed to let go? Even if she was a little distracted by Gia’s well-manicured nails—she’d never seen a green polish that shone like that—it couldn’t possibly go much longer, right?

Gia smiled, her grip loosened, and Cat took her cue. The two girls’ hands dropped to their sides. 

“So,” she said, after a moment of awkward silence. Cat braced herself for the inevitable: she'd excuse herself and it would be like this never happened. There was no reason for this encounter to last any longer. And not even a minute ago she'd have eagerly taken the chance for solitude. Now, though, inspire of herself, Cat wanted to know more about this girl who bought clothes with holes already in them and shook hands like she was in some period vidseries, playing at being an Earthling. All of Cat's expectations were dashed aside when Gia asked, "What'd you think of the movie?"

Any thought she'd had about the cute new girl onstation was replaced by the weird sense of dread that stupid vid had inspired. So, without considering that maybe she'd want to filter herself if she didn't want that cute new girl to think she was a complete disaster, Cat blurted, “It was total bullshit.”

Immediately, Cat wanted to melt in to the floor-grates. Or make a run for it.

She was still considering both options when Gia lit up. "Right?" she enthused, grabbing Cat's hands and bouncing a little on the balls of her feet. "Total bullshit!"

Cat laughed. She couldn't help it. She was so relieved that this beautiful girl agreed with her. How often, even leaving out the part about a beautiful girl, had that happened? Probably never. Gemma's kind assurances that she understood her point of view didn't count because she could understand everyone's point of view. It was what made her so infuriatingly patient. Lex and Mae and Elys certainly never took her side so whole-heartedly. They were all too busy trying to push their own perspective to listen to one another's. 

Gia, apparently, was different.

Though it did seem she had as much to say as her sisters. "Forget all the antiquated societal bullshit or whatever," she was saying, waving away an entire critique Cat had no interest in diving into, "the whole vid ended too soon."

"Uh—" Cat was pretty sure if the thing had gone on any longer, she would have lost her mind. She just couldn't figure out how to phrase that delicately.

"I mean," Gia rushed to add, "I wanted to find out what happened to the other characters. We all know where the vid was going with the romance as soon as that first dance scene came up, but everyone else was wasted."

That, Cat could agree with. For personal reasons more than artistic ones, but still.

"I know! The middle sisters were total footnotes to the story. Their whole point was to show how great Lizzie and Jane were!"

"The same with Darcy's sister. Her only purpose was to show that he wasn't a total asshole." She cursed without blinking, the shy nervousness she'd initially given off all but melted away.

Cat laughed again, and this time Gia joined in. 

It was a nice sound. Echoing off the cold metal and reinforced glass of the viewports, it was much warmer than it should have been. Almost as warm as the excited flutters building in Cat's stomach.

Before she quite knew what was happening, Cat found herself wandering the familiar halls of Meri-10 with Gia, pointing out places where she and Lex had gotten into all kinds of trouble when they were little, sometimes even dragging their older sisters along for the ride. Gia listened, avidly soaking in every detail and looking more than a bit wistful. She explained, after only a little prodding from Cat, that she'd grown up with just a brother, though they had cousins that hung around too. But he was so much older than her, he sometimes felt more like her dad. Or a faintly perplexed babysitter. 

"I'd take that over Mae's babysitting," Cat mused. "She's not even two cycles older than me, but she loved having the chance to boss me and Lex around. She'd make a good dictator."

Gia laughed, sharp and surprised. A hand flew up to muffle the sound, and she stared at Cat, incredulous and delighted over the top of it. "You can't say that! She's your sister!"

"I can say it because she's my sister," she argued. "I love her to death, and she likes to pretend she's the most moral of us all, but mostly she likes telling us exactly how we should do things. Don't you tease your brother?"

The shake of her head came almost immediately, but she didn't bother to defend herself. "We don't have that kind of relationship. I mean, obviously, we love each other, but he really did raise me for most of my life. He probably wouldn't know what to do if I just started making fun of him. Not that there's a lack of material."

"Oh? Spill," Cat demanded, jostling the other girl with a grin.

"Well," Gia considered, biting a lip as she thought. Which was a totally fine thing for Cat to notice. Well, more like she noticed how soft and plump that looked. It didn't make her feel any kind of fuzzy or warm all over. "He's a disaster, for one."

"A disaster how?" she managed to ask around the sense of embarrassment crowding into her throat when she had to tear her gaze away from Gia's mouth.

Was this what having a crush was like? It was awful.

Still, Cat wouldn't willingly give it up.

"My brother's one of the best people I know, he is. Once he warms up, that becomes obvious, but..." Gia trailed off, clearly less willing to badmouth her sibling than Cat was. Eventually, she sighed and shrugged. "He's terrible with people. He can fake it for a while, but once his tolerance runs out, it's not pretty. He can be short and rude, and honestly it's pretty embarrassing. But I'm also pretty sure it's finally bitten him in the ass."

Cat didn't have to do much more than raise her eyebrows before she continued. "There's this girl. I'm pretty sure he's in love with her. He thinks I don't know, but he's really not subtle. He's never mentioned a woman we're not related to unprompted, but this last cycle, at least 70% of his comms to me have mentioned her. Until none of them did."

She mulled this over. As someone who was pretty intimately acquainted with disasters, she said, "That doesn't sound so bad."

"It wouldn't, I guess," Gia allowed as they passed by the Market for the third time. "But I'm so used to him being so reliably constant, the change was obvious. Almost as obvious as when he stopped mentioning her altogether and started being," she paused, searching for the appropriate word, " _nice_."

"Oh no," Cat teased. "A  _nice_ older brother. How could you live like that?"

Gia rolled her eyes, but grinned, trying to tuck her hair behind her ear again. Cat would really need to get her a clip or something.

"Very funny, Cat," she drawled, drawing her companion's arm through hers. There was a light flush on her cheeks that Cat was sure matched, albeit more demurely, the fire on her own. "Now, show me how to get to the Rec Center."

Cat was more than happy to oblige. 

In spite of its rocky start, neither wanted their evening to end. Of course, it had to.

Almost simultaneously, after what had apparently been several hours wandering the station, a message came in on each of the girls' wrist panels. Cat flicked away her mother's dramatic demand for either her location or the pre-approved codeword for if she'd been abducted. Gia seemed to take hers more seriously. 

She frowned when she looked back up. "That was my brother. I should probably head back if I don't want him to send out a search party."

"Right," Cat replied, smiling even if it felt wooden. "Do you know where you're going?"

"Thanks to you. That was a very thorough tour."

Rather than give Cat time to wonder if she should have cut the tour short hours ago, Gia stepped forward. Before Cat could overthink it, she had a pair of arms wrapped around hers shoulders and a soft body pressed to hers. Automatically, she looped her arms around the other girl's waist. Once they were there, she couldn't help but notice how right it felt. Perfect even.

Gia's hug lingered for a long beat. Long enough to make Cat's heart begin to pound and her cheeks to flush for what felt like the thousandth time today. 

"I'll see you around?" she checked when they pulled away, feeling nervous in spite of all the evidence that said she shouldn't. After all, she wasn't the only one blushing in this otherwise abandoned hallway.

Gia grinned anyway, relieved. "Definitely. I think I have to meet these sisters of yours for myself."

"Only if you promise not to judge me for them," she groaned.

"Why would I judge you for your family? They sound amazing."

The fact that Gia looked like she believed that even a little bit was more than enough to get Cat to agree. 

"Okay," she said, giddy and breathless. It wasn't until Gia'd disappeared around a turn in the corridor that her lungs really started working again.

For the second time today, Cat had to lean against the unforgiving walls of the station to ground herself. At least this time, she needed to bring herself back down rather than drag herself back up.

Who would have thought the best night of her life could come after being ready to launch into a full blown panic spiral over a little over-identification with a fictional character? Not Cat, that was for sure. But now, with time and a little distance—and, yeah, the memory of a pretty girl's smile—she was much more willing to be philosophical about it all.

Maybe Kitty Bennet never made anything of herself, but what did it matter? She was a fictional character, written by some lady so long ago that Europe hadn't figured out how to regularly wash their hands and women were still considered the property of their husbands.

Cat was no one's property. Sure, she was still figuring some stuff out, but she knew that for sure. She was all her own. 

But, she thought, grinning down at her wrist panel already tapping in Gia's ID code to add her to her personal network, she definitely wouldn't mind sharing with the right person.

Even if, as Cat abruptly learned once her new friend's ID page flashed onto the screen, Gia was actually Georgia Delancey.

Yeah. One of  _those_ Delanceys.

Which meant, she realized once her brain stopped spinning for approximately the fifteenth time tonight, the brother she was onstation with was probably Wy Delancey. The same Wy Delancey who'd visited last cycle and managed to ruffle up Elys with almost no effort at all. Come to think of it, Cat had never seen anyone get under her sister's skin quite like Wy Delancey did.

Just like—

Art had to imitate life sometimes, right? It was a thing. One that people had been saying for millennia, Cat was pretty sure. Which meant it had to be at least a little bit true. Some of the time.

So, even if that vid and Jane Austen before it had gotten Cat wrong—so, so wrong—maybe it got one Benson girl right. Maybe even more than one if that friend Gia and her brother were visiting was Deputy Commissioner Bingh.

Which was why she began to hurry back to the flat. Her family might drive her crazy, but she did love them. If this news could make some of them happy, it wasn't fair to keep it from them one second longer than she had to. Plus, there was no way her mom would remain angry with her for going MIA if she brought the good gossip home.

Cat grinned, skipping a step or two.

She might not be the only Benson with romance in her future, but she would be the one to get it right on her first try. None of her sisters could say that, now could they?


End file.
